28/09/16 - RADIO: Costing the Earth: The Growing Season(28 mins) The Met Office recently issued a report which states that the growing season in the UK is now one month longer than it was in the 1960's. Keen gardeners may notice that spring bulbs are coming up much earlier and that fruit like apples are flowering sooner in the year whilst some farmers can now bring in their harvest before the end of the summer. Peter Gibbs discovers that whilst there are opportunities for growers in more Northerly latitudes rapid changes globally may put yields of vital crops at risk. The UK's gardeners, crop scientists and farmers are not simply sitting back and admitting defeat though. A changing climate is a challenge which many growers are busy preparing for.

11/05/16 - The gangsters on England's doorstep In the bleak flatlands of East Anglia, migrant workers are controlled by criminal gangs, and some are forced to commit crimes to pay off their debts. This is what happens when cheap labour is our only priority by Felicity Lawrence

28/03/16 - Crossing Continents: Romania: The Shepherds Revolt (28 mins) Lucy Ash asks why thousands of angry Romanian shepherds recently stormed the parliament in Bucharest. Sparked by an amendment to Romania's hunting law, the unprecedented protest was over plans to limit numbers of sheepdogs and restrict grazing rights. The increasing size of flocks is leading to growing conflict with both hunters and conservationists over land use. Romania has an influential hunting lobby - around two thirds of MPs are hunters - and they accuse shepherds dogs of scaring off or sometimes even killing their quarry. They also claim overgrazing is damaging the natural habitat of the deer, the boar and other wild animals they hunt. Environmental campaigners are concerned that winter grazing by ever larger flocks is having a catastrophic effect on biodiversity. At heart this is an argument about what the countryside is for. Is its main purpose an economic one? Is it primarily for leisure? Or should it be about the people who live there? Shepherds insist the law is an attack on centuries of sheep-rearing and their culture and traditions.

14/03/15 - Plymouth study finds bumblebees prefer road-facing hedgerows as pesticides damage habitats Research by ecologists at Plymouth University has shown some of the most common species of bumblebees are more than twice as likely to visit flowers on the road-facing side of hedgerows compared to crop-facing boundaries. Scientists examined bumblebee habits at 30 sites across Devon and Cornwall, and found a simple solution would be for farmers to leave a bigger gap between crops and hedgerows.

04/01/15 - 2015 Oxford Real Farming Conference: power, lies, and agrarian resistance As thousands rely on food banks to make it through the winter and a milk price crash threatens the survival of Britain's independent dairy farmers, Colin Tudge - co-founder of this week's Oxford Real Farming Conference - examines the growing need for an agrarian renaissance to tackle the increasingly obvious failings of neoliberal agriculture. "The small traditional farms that are so despised and routinely swept aside still produce 50% of the world's food, while 20% comes from fishing, hunting, and people's back gardens."

16/10/14 - Microdairies: remember milk with a creamy top? Will microdairying lead to a boom in local and artisan milk? A new breed of small dairy farms (such as North Aston Dairy), who process and brand their milk themselves, is emerging. They bypass the big dairy companies and supermarkets and sell it through doorstep deliveries, local shops and even vending machines: it is the polar opposite of the trend towards ever bigger herds and American-style mega-dairies, where 1,000 or more cows are reared, largely indoors, to keep costs down and meet supermarket demand for cheap milk.

01/09/13 - RADIO: On Your Farm As a trial badger cull is underway in parts of Somerset, and is likely to start in parts of Gloucestershire, Caz Graham joins the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust vaccinating badgers against bovine TB on Greystones Farm in Bourton-on-the-Water. The trust has embarked on a five year trial, vaccinating badgers on two sites in Gloucestershire to test the vaccine's efficacy. Their staff trap badgers and inject them with a BCG vaccine, before releasing them back into the wild. Caz visits farmers in the surrounding area to gauge their opinions on both the cull and badger vaccination as ways to tackle the problem of TB in cattle.

21/08/13 - Should pig swill from waste food be back on the menu? Pigs are the most efficient converter of food waste to calories - we need calories in this world to feed growing populations, but in the meantime all pigs throughout Europe are being fed soya which is being grown in the Amazon basin. Rainforests are crucial, but we are chopping them down to feed our pigs and it is just crazy.

13/06/13 - Glyphosate briefings: reason for concern Glyphosate is the world's best-selling weed killer and one of the most widely used herbicides in Europe. It is crucial for growing genetically modified (GM) crops, many of which are modified to withstand glyphosate. Concerns surround the safety of glyphosate particularly about its effect on human health, particularly on the hormone system, and its impact on the wider environment.

05/06/13 - The Pig Idea: Let them eat waste The campaign calls for waste food to go back on the menu for pig. The Pig Idea, launched today on World Environment Day, calls for change to the way we feed our pigs. Initiated by chef Thomasina Miers and food waste expert from Feeding the 5000, Tristram Stuart, the campaign aims to put food waste back on the menu for British pigs, and lobby to change European law in the long term, so that we can return to the traditional practice of feeding our surplus waste food to pigs.

20/02/13 - Reconnecting with Pastoral farming. The solution to meeting the challenge of tomorrow’s food production would therefore seem to be right under our noses, or at least those of our cows and sheep. We use the ability of ruminant cattle and sheep to make the best potential use out of grassland and use good productive arable land to grow crops such as cereals and soya, not as cattle feed with all of its associated inefficiencies, but for direct human consumption.

03/01/13 - GM crops not the answer to our food challenges Commenting on Environment Secretary Owen Paterson's assertion at the Oxford Farming Conference today (3 January 2013) that the British public should be persuaded of the benefits of genetically modified food, Friends of the Earth's senior food and farming campaigner Clare Oxborrow said:

GM crops are not the solution to the food challenges we face. They are largely being developed to benefit multinational biotech firms that are gaining control of the seed industry, not to feed poor people in developing countries.

World food production needs a radical overhaul, but this should be based on less intensive practices that increase agricultural diversity, deliver resilience to the impacts of climate change and benefit local communities.

We must also switch to more sustainable diets globally, including reducing meat-consumption in wealthy nations and an end to food crops being used for biofuels.

05/03/12 - TV: BBC Panorama - The Money Farmers Samantha Poling reveals how millions of pounds of public money are being paid out to businessmen and millionaire farmers in an abuse of the farming subsidy system. Investors tell us how they have been paid without having to do any farming at all.

14/06/11 - Michael Hart, a conventional livestock family farmer, has been farming in Cornwall for nearly thirty years and has actively campaigned on behalf of family farmers for over fifteen years, travelling extensively in Europe, India, Canada and the USA. In this short documentary he investigates the reality of farming genetically modified crops in the USA ten years after their introduction. He travels across the US interviewing farmers and other specialists about their experiences of growing GM.

04/04/09 - TV: BBC Natural World - A Farm for the Future (Clips) Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is. Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.

13/04/06 - Healthy diet for badgers might solve bovine TB. Feeding badgers is probably lowest on many TB affected farmers' priorities, but ensuring they have adequate minerals could be key to eliminating TB. Dick Roper, of Broadfield Farms, Eastington, Northleach, believes the disease is caused by a selenium and vitamin E deficiency in the maize diet of both badgers and cattle.

Greenpeace, Golden Rice and vitamin A deficiency Since GM Golden Rice was presented, solutions such as growing vegetables alongside rice and taking vitamin A supplements have proven to be very good working solutions for vitamin A deficiency in places like Bangladesh. "Genetically Engineered rice could, if introduced on a large scale, exacerbate malnutrition and undermine food security because it encourages a diet based on a single industrial staple food rather than upon the re-introduction of the many vitamin-rich food plants with high nutritional value that are cheap and already available," says Professor Klaus Becker, from University of Hohenheim, Germany.

Chadlington Kitchen Garden grows fruit, vegetables and many varieties of salad on a vegetable plot with a polytunnel, asparagus bed and orchard in Chadlington. The CSA’s members pay a monthly subscription and in return receive a weekly share of the produce from the garden. Also order sourdough artisan bread from The Bread Shed - Deep Baked and collect at the same time.

Garden waste recycling - sign up now! From April 2017 household garden waste collections from West Oxfordshire District Council will cost £30 per bin, per year. To receive this fortnightly service, you will need to sign up. This can be done quickly and easily online with your credit or debit card. Alternatively, call 01993 861025.

Do you have mistletoe in your garden? Complete this simple form online to record your findings . Survey to produce a baseline to assess possible changes in the distribution of mistletoe due to predicted future climate change effects. So far mistletoe has been found on approximately 900 trees in southern Oxfordshire, with approximately 3,300 mistletoe clumps noted.

Welcome to Oxon:EEK, providing Oxfordshire with energy efficiency knowledge. Here you can expect to find useful information about how to reduce your carbon footprint. You may be interested in the money you will save or you may be interested in reducing your own personal climate impact. Either way you will find here information on:

Reducing your energy use and waste at home

How you could generate renewable energy yourself

Tips from local people who know about doing this

Links for further reading

Case studies from local people who have done it recently

Share your experiences

If you live in Oxfordshire and have had any experience in these energy efficiency measures, then your comments can be included on the site. Just fill in this simple form and send it through to oxoneek@lcon.org.uk